Ep. 64: Lorie Tensen is an author. She’s also “bionic.” It’s not hard to see why. Having been dealt a number of challenges in life, she’s rebuilt herself stronger than ever before. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on May 7, 1966. The result of an affair between a married, Black detective and a foreigner: a woman from Honduras. Seven months later, she was adopted into a White, Dutch family and raised in a small, farming community two hours west of the Twin Cities. At the age of 12, Lorie suffered a terrible accident, resulting in the loss of her right hand and lower arm. This led to years of grappling with her own self-image and self-esteem. Later in life, she struggled through college, where her racial background set her apart. Then, she was a single mom working hard to make ends meet. She later married, but the marriage ended in divorce, and Lorie found herself struggling again. But, by focusing on her passion, on raising her kids, and on her goal of giving back, she found herself on the right career path. Hers in an inspirational story, and you can read about it in her memoir: “Taking My Hand Out of My Pocket” available here: http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Hand-Out-My-Pocket/dp/0692266054 For more on host, Alex Barnett, please check out his website: www.alexbarnettcomic.com or visit him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/alexbarnettcomic) or on Twitter at @barnettcomic To subscribe to the Multiracial Family Man, please click here: MULTIRACIAL FAMILY MAN PODCAST Intro and Outro Music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons – By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Sanchez has lectured at more than five hundred universities and colleges in the United States and had traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadephia.

We use “passes” and “presents” as if multiracial individuals have full say and control over their racialization. When they don’t at all. Could I work to pass as white? Yes. But would it work? Maybe. It all depends on the reader. Meaning this: we only pass when others let us pass. Full agency does not rest with individuals. Similarly when we say someone “presents as” we imply the person is choosing that presentation. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes that’s not true. For example I often hear adults describe multiracial children as young as infancy as “white presenting.” How in the world is a child less than a year old presenting their race at all? Who is actually presenting their race? WE are. When we assign a description. Regardless of whether the assessment is true, why aren’t we saying “I read the child as white” which claims accountability rather than asserting our perception on someone else and insinuating they made that decision on their own?

Like this:

Social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient’s skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine — and invites us to be a part of ending it. “It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy,” she says, “and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.”